OOTS #1151 - The Discussion Thread

[Jack Of Rivia]

I already support that. See, its really easy to live your life conscious of your actions



I dont think it's harmful to be insufficiently clean. It's a bad metaphor, just the same as if he was to be judged in the future for not conforming to some fashion trend.
(also, its completely unrelated, but a society like that is hilarious. It has to be sufficient anti-capital to excuse the huge productivity drop, and intensely hygiene-oriented, but not enough to invest in faster cleaning technology. A quick look at cleaning technology shows a trend of cleaning better in less time, so something wild must have happened)

This is exactly the kind of language im talking about. Culture doesn't 'progress', this isn't a video game. It's real people, doing real things to other real people. Society didn't level up and we unlocked the "women are people, not property" technology. You compare it to antibiotics like "oh sure we married her off against her will but its okay because caring about women's autonomy hadn't been invented yet". Forced marriage is wrong because it involves treating people like they are things, not because everyone around you says its wrong.

Sure, let's give anyone a cyanide pills, expecially depressedb teenagers. Not an thrilling prospective for me.
Anyway, that doesn't matter. Is it not important who is right or not, what matters is that our respective position are respectable, and to the 22th century sociology student which is making his PhD on early 21th century forum wars, i say. If you judge us sitting on your flying seat, you are an a-hole.

Now, on the female emancipation... i think we use to understimate the influence of technogical and economical changes.
Even today, a teen unplanned pregnancy is disruptive on her whole life: try imagine it in the fifteen century. Today we have female partecipation to workforce, and various measure of public health and welfare, but in the past, survival of a pregnant woman or mother was clan or family based. It was that or starving. And sadly, this kind of protection came with an heavy price, which unfortunately felt almost on thebshoukders ofbwomen. The female's clan wanted to choose the husband, to make sure his economic, social and genetic potential could contribuite to the prosperity of the clan; the male's clan, beside these requests, also needed a fertile bride, and maybe ever more important, a "pure" one. In a world without parental test, a young and virgin bride was the simpliest way to assure that at least one of the offspring would carry the male´s (and by extension, his clan's) blood.
(I just realized that this explain also why being the first born was so important: the first born was also the one with the highest chance to bear the husband blood.)
Arranged marriage, and its degeneration, forced marriage, was not evil for the sake of evil: it was the deeply flawed and unfair solution our ancestors found, for a set of problems that we luckily no longer have.

The moral is this: do not judge someone for how he solves a problem you do not have.

[Ironsmith]

Sure, let's give anyone a cyanide pills, expecially depressedb teenagers. Not an thrilling prospective for me.
Anyway, that doesn't matter. Is it not important who is right or not, what matters is that our respective position are respectable, and to the 22th century sociology student which is making his PhD on early 21th century forum wars, i say. If you judge us sitting on your flying seat, you are an a-hole.

*silent fist-pump*

Now, on the female emancipation... i think we use to understimate the influence of technogical and economical changes.
Even today, a teen unplanned pregnancy is disruptive on her whole life: try imagine it in the fifteen century. Today we have female partecipation to workforce, and various measure of public health and welfare, but in the past, survival of a pregnant woman or mother was clan or family based. It was that or starving. And sadly, this kind of protection came with an heavy price, which unfortunately felt almost on thebshoukders ofbwomen. The female's clan wanted to choose the husband, to make sure his economic, social and genetic potential could contribuite to the prosperity of the clan; the male's clan, beside these requests, also needed a fertile bride, and maybe ever more important, a "pure" one. In a world without parental test, a young and virgin bride was the simpliest way to assure that at least one of the offspring would carry the male´s (and by extension, his clan's) blood.
(I just realized that this explain also why being the first born was so important: the first born was also the one with the highest chance to bear the husband blood.)
Arranged marriage, and its degeneration, forced marriage, was not evil for the sake of evil: it was the deeply flawed and unfair solution our ancestors found, for a set of problems that we luckily no longer have.

The moral is this: do not judge someone for how he solves a problem you do not have.

It's also worth noting that our biggest social revolutions in that regard tended to follow in the immediate wake of technological progress; sure, there might've been the occasional woman in the workforce prior, but the number of female workers skyrocketed once the Industrial Revolution took off.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

It's also worth noting that our biggest social revolutions in that regard tended to follow in the immediate wake of technological progress; sure, there might've been the occasional woman in the workforce prior, but the number of female workers skyrocketed once the Industrial Revolution took off.

I am really skeptical about this claim. Before the Industrial revolution, 90% of the population grew food. Peasantry is and always has been an all-hands-on-deck proposition. Women worked, just like men worked, before the industrial revolution.

What you might mean is "for wages", but if so you need to be explicit about it. And even in that case, I want to see some hard data. That women were routinely abused, demeaned and payed less for equal work is undisputed. That they were actively stopped from participating in the workforce before the industrial revolution and not after it, I am less certain about.

Grey Wolf

[pendell]

I am really skeptical about this claim. Before the Industrial revolution, 90% of the population grew food. Peasantry is and always has been an all-hands-on-deck proposition. Women worked, just like men worked, before the industrial revolution.

What you might mean is "for wages", but if so you need to be explicit about it. And even in that case, I want to see some hard data. That women were routinely abused, demeaned and payed less for equal work is undisputed. That they were actively stopped from participating in the workforce before the industrial revolution and not after it, I am less certain about.

Grey Wolf

Indeed

From the earliest days . . . until greater urbanisation and the industrial revolution, women laboured in the fields besides their husbands and sons. It was not only the milking and feeding of livestock, but they spread the manure, carried the sheaves for threshing, cleaned out the byres and stables and helped winnow the corn, as an account from the Lothians in 1656 makes clear. A fit and able wife was essential to any adult male agricultural worker. It was also expected that not only were they the cooks for the main daily meal, but that bread would have been baked and at times of glut for any fruit and vegetable, it would be preserved, bottled, pickled or dried.

Women’s work was not confined to farming. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coal-mining women were part of the workforce; colliers in the east Lothian had to provide bearers to carry the coal to the surface, and generally they chose their wives and daughters. In pits such as Loanhead in Midlothian in the 1680s or Bo’ness in West Lothian during the 1760s women outnumbered men by two to one. This phenomenon was almost unknown in England. Women who lived around large towns could market vegetables, fruit and dairy products; fishwives from Fishmerrow and Prestonpans walked to Edinburgh to sell the fish caught by their husbands and fathers. Rural domestic industry was important, especially in the textile industry, and in the mid-eighteenth century roughly eighty per cent of adult women were involved in spinning. Women’s participation in trade was generally limited to shop-keeping. . . . The concept of a ‘housewife’ (a married woman who simply looked after her house and family) did not exist until the eighteenth century, until with greater urbanisation the burgeoning of the middle classes occurred and female leisure became an indication of the husband’s social status. [194]

*Nods* A point about "working from home" is that up until industrialization pretty much everyone worked at home. If you were a farmer, you lived on your farm. If you were a smith, your smithy and living quarters adjoined each other. Same with printers and silversmiths and ... well, pretty much everyone really. In this universe, unless you are a servant working in someone else's house, your "family" is a small corporation, each person pitching in as best they can. If mom is better than accounts than Dad is, mom does the account. The shop is simply too small for artificial sex roles; what you do is what you're best at , because if you don't no one eats.

So it wasn't just women that worked at home; everyone did, men and women both.

There's an irony that modern technology and telecommuting is bringing this back to some extent

At any rate, the 19th century saw industrialization, which meant that instead of tight-knit family corporations you find massive industrial concerns which eat up labor like a mill consuming grain; men are taken away from sunup to sundown, while women are relegated to a housewife supporting role. No longer equals and partners, women started pushing harder for both full equality and equal pay.

So it's kind of funny that way ; modern equal rights started out with the modern age making the lot of women far worse and far less equal. It's only been with the greatest effort that this has been turned around. But the early industrial age was not a step forward ; it made slaves out of ordinary men and women both. Small wonder Marxism was so popular!

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Indeed

It's practically a rule that everything terrible about the "dark" ages was invented by the victorians to make their ****ty social mores seem better in comparison. Bathing? No, the middle ages bathed more often. Sexual conduct? No, far more liberal in the middle ages. Work participation? Add it to the list.

In the intro to Pillars of the Earth, Follet mentions in passing that in researching the novel, he was rather surprised by how many women were listed as Master Architects in the pay charts of medieval England. It was extremely common for a woman to work alongside their husbands, learn their trade and, if the husband died, they just kept at it. I suspect that what kept women back was not sexism, but medicine: when your life expectancy is terrible because the primary cause of death is childbirth (followed by, of course, kestrels), it makes it hard to outlive your husband.

Grey Wolf

[Potatopeelerkin]

It's worth mentioning technological improvements isn't just limited to "Do they have cars or not?" The really important changes we've had in the last few decades have been to do with communication and literacy. Suddenly, people are getting educated, suddenly even the most common people can read about history and science and humanities, and suddenly we're exposed to a wealth of information that wouldn't have been possible at any other time in the world. It means that traditions are less important, because rather than simply having the wisdom of our parents and immediate society at our disposal we have the whole planet's. And we also have a lot more spare time to think about and question these ideas than we used to.

So in light of this, it's much easier to question traditions now than it ever was in the past. Ideas like "women shouldn't be allowed to vote" were believed to be for the best for women at the time- because the belief was that the genders were deeply, inherently different, made for different purposes, and that a woman could only be happy fulfilling her role and a man could only be happy fulfilling his. (A major one of these ideas being that a woman who made her own decisions was going against her nature). Without any scientific or historical background to go off of, it's easy to think that that assumption was correct, and assume that anyone who is unhappy with the situation has a problem because they're unhappy and not because the society is flawed.

It's like- imagine if someone told you tomorrow that lungs didn't actually exist (assuming you've never actually opened a person up to see). At this point in your life, it's just an established fact that that's how humans work. Chances are, you'll just dismiss it out of hand and never think about it again. The idea that a woman could thrive in a leadership position would go against basic ideas they'd accepted as fact as kids about how humans work, so they dismissed it too.

Having the tools to question is vital to being able to make change. Even today people with an education, an understanding of history and science, and with more leisure time are much more progressive than those who aren't. To suggest this is some great personal moral failing on their part rather than a result of disadvantage takes what we have for granted, and it suggests that people without an education are just more evil than those with one.

[zimmerwald1915]

Even today people with an education, an understanding of history and science, and with more leisure time are much more progressive than those who aren't.

This is a very recent phenomenon, if it even exists at all. As recently as the 1970s, people without a college degree were far more likely to hold *ahem* progressive positions on the pressing issues of the day than people with. For as much as universities are caricatured as hotbeds of critical theory, they are equally if not moreso bastions of para-eugenics and economic reductionism.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

{Scrubbed}

[Potatopeelerkin]

HAHAHAHAHA.

No.

The reason for "women can't vote" is the same as "only nobles can be in parliament" and "only landowners can vote" and "only white people can vote". Those already in power fit the category and don't want to share. Spare me the "reasonings" sold to the rubes. If you want to claim that anyone in power at any time seriously believed the idea that "women are inherently different", present evidence.

You think an entire half of the population made the collective, cohesive decision to keep the other half out of any decision making completely conscious of the fact they were equally able, and managed to keep their reasoning consistent? If people are half as horrible as you seem to think they are, nothing would have ever changed, ever. The movements to get women and racial minorities the vote wouldn't have ever worked if they didn't introduce new information into the society and convince people who had some power to change things.

Hell, I'm sure that whoever you are right now, you have some power over someone. Are you really trying to maintain that power at all costs, or are you trying to do what you believe is best with what you have?

Historical attitudes towards mental health in women was based off that idea. Hysteria? A result of being a childless woman. The rest cure? Doing things was bad for a woman's mental health, so they should rest to recuperate. Any medical literature on women from the time is evidence for the perception of their differences. I don't know what doctors would have had to gain from prescribing women treatments for imaginary illnesses based on pseudoscience if they didn't actually believe it.

This is a very recent phenomenon, if it even exists at all. As recently as the 1970s, people without a college degree were far more likely to hold *ahem* progressive positions on the pressing issues of the day than people with. For as much as universities are caricatured as hotbeds of critical theory, they are equally if not moreso bastions of para-eugenics and economic reductionism.

I should clarify- information from a range of different people. A university education when the only people allowed in the university are white and male and where the only people allowed to write the books are white and male isn't going to be very enlightening on social issues involving people who aren't men or white.

[Peelee]

You think an entire half of the population made the collective, cohesive decision to keep the other half out of any decision making completely conscious of the fact they were equally able, and managed to keep their reasoning consistent?

I think a small collective is able to persuade a larger collective of enough of their platform to accept parts they otherwise disagree with to whatever extent, and can use that to gain or maintain power. Far less than half is usually needed. I'd love to pull out examples, but alas.

[zimmerwald1915]

Counterpoint: the 1848 (failed) revolution was cooked up in Universities. The bulk of the fighters were workmen seeing their traditional jobs threatened by technology (especially the train & the cheap imports it allowed), but the progressive positions associated to them were created by the educated students & lawyers that drove them in an attempt to obtain political power for themselves.

That would be exactly backwards. The educated students and lawyers near-uniformly started out in 1847 much more blinkered in their program than the workers. Some reevaluated their positions in light of their contact with the workers' movement, while others did not.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

{Scrubbed}

[Potatopeelerkin]

I think a small collective is able to persuade a larger collective of enough of their platform to accept parts they otherwise disagree with to whatever extent, and can use that to gain or maintain power. Far less than half is usually needed. I'd love to pull out examples, but alas.

It's possible that the people at the very top of the leadership chain were fully conscious of what they were doing, but I think it's more likely they truly believed what they were saying. Of course, if a group of people tends to disagree with you, you're probably all the more likely to convince yourself that it's because they're not capable of thinking clearly...

If you disagree I won't argue the point, though. It doesn't really matter what the people ultimately in charge thought for the purposes of this discussion, if we're just judging the morality of the people beneath them who followed their rules.

No, I don't, but if I know remember that you can't actually engage with real arguments and instead rely on beating strawmen, so have fun with that.

Your pathetic attempt at immediately insulting me rather than my arguments is also a big tell.

Grey Wolf

Your arguments? Your arguments were a broad description of how you believe humans act with no evidence provided, and then a demand for me to provide evidence.

I argued against what I thought your position was, which didn't seem to hold much water. That doesn't mean I was deliberately strawmanning you. If I misinterpreted you please clarify, and preferably without making such a righteous display of being dishonestly attacked about it.

Oh, and on the topic of insults? Your first words to me were "HAHAHAHAHA. No." This is a black kettle indeed.

[Goblin_Priest]

{Scrubbed}

[georgie_leech]

No, I don't, but if I know remember that you can't actually engage with real arguments and instead rely on beating strawmen, so have fun with that.

Your pathetic attempt at immediately insulting me rather than my arguments is also a big tell.

Grey Wolf

Maybe take a step back? Tone is tough to parse on the internet, but I'm not sure that was meant to be insulting at all?

[Skull the Troll]

I dont think it's harmful to be insufficiently clean. It's a bad metaphor, just the same as if he was to be judged in the future for not conforming to some fashion trend.
(also, its completely unrelated, but a society like that is hilarious. It has to be sufficient anti-capital to excuse the huge productivity drop, and intensely hygiene-oriented, but not enough to invest in faster cleaning technology. A quick look at cleaning technology shows a trend of cleaning better in less time, so something wild must have happened)

This is exactly the kind of language im talking about. Culture doesn't 'progress', this isn't a video game. It's real people, doing real things to other real people. Society didn't level up and we unlocked the "women are people, not property" technology. You compare it to antibiotics like "oh sure we married her off against her will but its okay because caring about women's autonomy hadn't been invented yet". Forced marriage is wrong because it involves treating people like they are things, not because everyone around you says its wrong.

Your entire post just proved my point. You don't think its bad to be insufficiently clean? Lets reverse the metaphor. All those real life people in the 1800's that only took baths once a month? They felt like they were sufficiently clean, just like you do. The idea that you would take the time to bathe EVERY DAY? Ridiculous. The ones from Shakespeare's time that only bathed in June? Them too. You are judging another time by our standards. We have no doubt that those people from 500 years ago were wrong to only bath once a year, just like the much more serious problem of forced marriage, but the people of time had the culture they had and didn't deserve to be killed for it, which was the source of this conversation.

[2D8HP]

I'm not saying they should warn them. And I did say Juliet should use poison.

I thought you said she should use fire?

If I did, I sorta meant after the poison. Regardless, I'm not claiming to think she should have used swordplay, given her context.

Well I for one am totally on-board for a Romeo and Juliet/Kill Bill mash-up!

The more I think about it "Directed by Tarantino, written by Shakespeare" seems like a great idea!

Almost as good as Shakespeare in the original Klingon.

[pendell]

{scrubbed}

[Yirggzmb]

You entire post just proved my point. You dont think its bad to be insufficently clean? Lets reverse the metaphor. All those real life people in the 1800's that only took baths once a month? They felt like they were sufficiently clean, just like you do. The idea that you would take the time to bathe EVERY DAY? Ridiculous. The ones from Shakespere's time that only bathed in June? Them too. You are judging another time by our standards. We have no doubt that those people from 500 years ago were wrong to only bath once a year, just like the much more serious problem of forced marriage, but the people of time had the culture they had and didn't deserve to be killed for it, which was the source of this conversation.

I mean, I'm not from the 1800s and I happen to think bathing literally every day is ridiculous... Like, I'd prefer more than once a month as well, but as long as you keep the important parts relatively clean (especially hands) only bathing occasionally wouldn't be the end of the world. I don't have any sources at the moment, but I know I've read that a lot of cultures used to do a face, hands, bits wash regularly but save actual baths for occasional things.

[The Extinguisher]

You entire post just proved my point. You dont think its bad to be insufficently clean? Lets reverse the metaphor. All those real life people in the 1800's that only took baths once a month? They felt like they were sufficiently clean, just like you do. The idea that you would take the time to bathe EVERY DAY? Ridiculous. The ones from Shakespere's time that only bathed in June? Them too. You are judging another time by our standards. We have no doubt that those people from 500 years ago were wrong to only bath once a year, just like the much more serious problem of forced marriage, but the people of time had the culture they had and didn't deserve to be killed for it, which was the source of this conversation.

Well, i think you missed my point? If someone right now were to tell me they only bathe once a year i wouldnt have a problem with it. Like, whatever, you live your life how you want to, i dont care. im not judging them at all.

(also, people in the past kept clean. the idea that everyone 500 years ago was filthy is just more "people in the past were dumb")

[Ironsmith]

Well, i think you missed my point? If someone right now were to tell me they only bathe once a year i wouldnt have a problem with it. Like, whatever, you live your life how you want to, i dont care. im not judging them at all.

(also, people in the past kept clean. the idea that everyone 500 years ago was filthy is just more "people in the past were dumb")

There's two different positions here: "people in the past were idiots/ignorant" or "people in the past were a-holes". The former is readily apparent, as people in the present are also idiots, while the latter... eh.

(There is a potential third position, "the past was all right", but I don't think anyone's backing that one.)

[Sir_Norbert]

(There is a potential third position, "the past was all right", but I don't think anyone's backing that one.)

Well, I'll back it. Sure, there are bad things about the past, and I personally wouldn't want to live there (no computers, for a start). But there are plenty of bad things going on in the world in our own times. Science has come on much further, but there are still many people who are ignorant of really basic things. The internet has made it easy to disseminate knowledge, and also made it easy for those who want to cover up the truth with lies.

Civilisation makes slow progress, with steps backward as well as forward. Humanity, on the whole, hasn't changed very much. That's why we can still enjoy literature of the past, or literature set in the past -- those people are us and we understand them.

[The_Weirdo]

Well I for one am totally on-board for a Romeo and Juliet/Kill Bill mash-up!

The more I think about it "Directed by Tarantino, written by Shakespeare" seems like a great idea!

Almost as good as Shakespeare in the original Klingon.

See? And you folks complain! I'm a helper!

[Ironsmith]

Well, I'll back it. Sure, there are bad things about the past, and I personally wouldn't want to live there (no computers, for a start). But there are plenty of bad things going on in the world in our own times. Science has come on much further, but there are still many people who are ignorant of really basic things. The internet has made it easy to disseminate knowledge, and also made it easy for those who want to cover up the truth with lies.

Civilisation makes slow progress, with steps backward as well as forward. Humanity, on the whole, hasn't changed very much. That's why we can still enjoy literature of the past, or literature set in the past -- those people are us and we understand them.

Fair enough. At the same time, though, "I personally wouldn't want to live there", applied across the board, implies that the present day is better overall than the distant past, at least by our standards. That's where "people were a-holes" and "people were idiots" come in; respectively, they state that the difference between now and then is that we've obtained moral superiority, and that we've obtained knowledge that allows us to address our problems more effectively. The latter is obvious, and is to some degree present in all the above rhetorics; the primary point of that address is that such is pretty much the only difference and we're not any more/less saintly than our ancestors were.

[Potatopeelerkin]

{scrubbed}

[Ruck]

You think an entire half of the population made the collective, cohesive decision to keep the other half out of any decision making completely conscious of the fact they were equally able, and managed to keep their reasoning consistent?

Why do you think they cared about keeping their reasoning consistent? Power only cares about itself. Maybe they cooked up some justifications afterward-- the powerful funding an intellectual/managerial class to justify their actions exists still today-- but I don't think too many people in the ruling class really prioritize rationality or fairness.

How acceptable it would be to live in the past depends on who you are. At least if we're talking about the history of western countries, only in recent decades has homosexuality been legal, which is already a strong point against living then for me. And the right to marry only passed two years ago here! Those who would have been potential victims of slavery or lynching would also probably much rather live now, I imagine.

At the same time, "homosexuality" as its own, separate distinction only really came into being about 150 years ago. Same-sex behavior might have been less openly celebrated-- particularly among ruling classes where the need to marry and reproduce was important to maintaining power, and whose lives were better documented than others-- but it was there.

[Ironsmith]

Why do you think they cared about keeping their reasoning consistent? Power only cares about itself. Maybe they cooked up some justifications afterward-- the powerful funding an intellectual/managerial class to justify their actions exists still today-- but I don't think too many people in the ruling class really prioritize rationality or fairness.

I read that as being part of the point; they didn't need or have any particularly strong motive to keep consistent reasoning, and yet they did anyway.

[Potatopeelerkin]

{Scrubbed}

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff: Let's drag this back in a direction related to comic and away from real world politics and religion.

[Skull the Troll]

Well, i think you missed my point? If someone right now were to tell me they only bathe once a year i wouldnt have a problem with it. Like, whatever, you live your life how you want to, i dont care. im not judging them at all.

(also, people in the past kept clean. the idea that everyone 500 years ago was filthy is just more "people in the past were dumb")

I'm NOT calling them dumb. The original point I was making was about some of the people in the forum thinking that the people of the past should have known better than to do some of the things they did. I'm defending those people of the past (as do most historians) because their society was what it was. Progress (forward or backward) is inevitable and it relies on what came before. Dumb people cant make the Taj Mahal or the Sistine Chapel, and they did so without power tools.


Edit sorry I just saw your post Roland, I'll drop the topic. Its been hard the last few pages.